Evil Cries Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1. Not the Welcome Wagon

  Chapter 2. A Shot not in the Dark

  Chapter 3. Now and Then

  Chapter 4. Let's Go Boating

  Chapter 5. Open for Business

  Chapter 6. Rappers

  Chapter 7. Bigger is Better

  Chapter 8. A Business Lunch

  Chapter 9. Don't Cry Woof

  Chapter 10. The Price of Love

  Chapter 11. Just Girl Talk

  Chapter 12. A Sociopath and a Psychopath Walked into a Bar

  Chapter 13. New Friends and Old

  Chapter 14. Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

  Chapter 15. Not Pro Bono

  Chapter 16. Getting to Know You

  Chapter 17. Stillborn

  Chapter 18. My Bad Juju

  Chapter 19. Second Homes

  Chapter 20. A Dickless Tracy

  Chapter 21. The First Guest

  Chapter 22. Birthdays are for Hallmark

  Chapter 23. The Windy City

  Chapter 24. The Ride

  Chapter 25. The St. George

  Chapter 26. The Skull

  Chapter 27. The Weekend

  Chapter 28. The Powwow

  Chapter 29. Ancient History

  Chapter 30. One Busy Monday

  Chapter 31. Second Blood

  Chapter 32. Not Just Coffee

  Chapter 33. A Desert Tsunami

  Chapter 34. Just Dinner

  Chapter 35. Facts to Find

  Chapter 36. Goodwill Calls

  Chapter 37. Evidence

  Chapter 38. Jazz with an Extra Beat Going On

  Chapter 39. Suspect List

  Chapter 40. The Chosen Ones

  Chapter 41. The Truth and Nothing, but the Truth

  Chapter 42. Skin

  Chapter 43. Not a Happy Hour

  Chapter 44. Beyond Words, Rumors, and Reason

  Chapter 45. Missing

  Chapter 46. The Devil’s Advocate & The Devil

  Chapter 47. Martinis & a Black SUV

  Chapter 48. Poisons

  Chapter 49. Oleanders & Opals

  Chapter 50. Late for a Fiasco Date

  Chapter 51. Not in Public

  Chapter 52. Crochet & Hell Holes

  Chapter 53. The Mad Bomber

  Chapter 54. 1 + 1 = 3

  Chapter 55. A Skin for a Skin

  Chapter 56. The Leap

  Chapter 57. Pearls

  Chapter 58. A Hole in the Whole

  Chapter 59. Emergence

  Chapter 60. Together & Totally Alone

  Chapter 61. Dreams

  Chapter 62. Nashville

  Chapter 63. The Summer Haven of Mt. Lemmon

  Chapter 64. Maybe Three & Maybe Six & for Sure, One

  Chapter 65. A Horse is a Horse. Of Course.

  Chapter 66. The Octopus

  Chapter 67. Freedom Cries

  Chapter 68. Black & White

  Chapter 69. Follow the Money

  Chapter 70. “Today’s the day, men.”

  Chapter 71. The Crowbar & the Angel

  Chapter 72. Dark Promise

  Chapter 73. Out of Practice

  Chapter 74. Tell Me What You See

  Chapter 75. Dancing in the Breezeway

  Chapter 76. For the Rest of Our Lives

  Chapter 77. Unwanted Sleep

  Chapter 78. Copycat

  Chapter 79. The Desert

  Chapter 80. The Sarah

  Chapter 81. Fleeting Hope

  Chapter 82. Dogs Know

  Chapter 83. Into the Mist

  Chapter 84. The Trail of a Chameleon

  Chapter 85. The West Coast & Waters

  Chapter 86. Planting for a Future

  Chapter 87. This is Getting Fun

  Chapter 88. Good Medicine

  Chapter 89. It’s Not a Fresh Dolphin Catch

  Chapter 90. Goodbye. Hello.

  Chapter 91. Bravo!

  Kiss and Kill

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, incidents, places, and dialogue, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. It may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, to include electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission, in writing, from the author.

  For permissions contact the author at [email protected]

  ISBN-13: 978-1492140139

  Copyright © 2013 Lala Corriere

  All rights reserved. Bridge Publishing. © 2013

  Here’s what the Master of Suspense, Sidney Sheldon, said about the Mistress to Romantic Suspense, Author Lala Corriere—

  “Her writing is provocative and fast-paced, with vivid descriptions and skillfully crafted dialogue. Real page-turners.”

  About Evil Cries:

  "A Southwestern Sizzler."

  CJ West, author of

  The End of Marking Time

  I’m amazed at how sharply Corriere can turn a scene from an everyday-like setting into a twisted, evil-filled action-packed crime novel. She’s honed her crime-writing skills, researched ideas thoroughly, created believable characters and well-driven dialogue, and pushed the envelope with out-of-this-world story lines.

  ~The Virtual Scribe~

  As always, to Chuck Corriere.

  You tolerate my work crazy work hours and you tolerate my crazier ideas. And you’re still not afraid to climb in bed with me! ILYM.

  In loving memory of my mother, Shirley Jean.

  Posthumous thanks to Sidney Sheldon, the Master of Suspense, for his guidance and mentoring.

  Credits & Special Acknowledgements:

  A huge thank you to the real Detective Steve Taylor, who gifted me facts for this story. Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction!

  My thanks to Brian B. Tousley, LCDR USCG, retired, for his help with my Coast Guard scene.

  Thank you to John Rafferty, for his expert yachtsman advice.

  Editor: Bonnie Lewis

  Back Cover and Interior Design: Patty G. Henderson

  evil cries

  Is he crying for you?

  From bestselling novelist,

  Lala Corriere

  Author of

  Widow’s Row

  CoverBoys & Curses

  When a doctor does go wrong,

  he is the first of criminals.

  He has nerve

  and he has knowledge.

  ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The sociopath notices the panties lying on the floor next to his motionless victim. He picks them up, wads them in his hands, delighted at the prospect. He shudders with delight and maybe apprehension. Should he keep them? Yes, he should. Trophies. But what will he do with them? Where should he hide them where they will live on forever?

  The psychopath snatches the panties from the dead. Once in his hands, he gently folds them, starting from the left, then center to the right, then up from the bottom to meet the top. He tucks them inside the silk case he has in his left breast pocket. He’s been adding to his collection for years. And like all new trophies, he knows exactly where this newest pair of intimates will go.

  And all should cry.

  Chapter 1

  Not the Welcome Wagon

  SHE SMELLED LIKE Hell’s testicles. Rotten teeth. Bleeding gums and grimy hair in a rat’s nest of wiry mesh. And urine?

  We hadn’t even officially opened our new second store and Bag Lady decides she can stagger right through the front door.

  I should have kept the door locked, but all of our jewelry pieces were sealed in the vault until I
had the security alarm fully functioning and we were open for business.

  Bag Lady stumbled toward the center of the store. I slid behind the counter, but in full stance, which is a pretty tall drink. She didn’t scare me. She reeked.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. I tried to be patient. This was not the first customer in Tucson I had imagined for Falls & Falls. We were the jeweler to the stars in Beverly Hills. I at least hoped my clientele would brush their teeth.

  She turned around. Her grubby hands braced against my beautifully polished glass display cases awaiting their shiny treasure chests of gold, platinum, and gems.

  “I don’t think I have anything here you want,” I said.

  She remained silent. Her eyes searched mine.

  “I don’t even have any food. Look, I can give you bottled water and maybe twenty bucks, but then you need to promise you won’t come back. Do you understand?”

  Bag Lady nodded. A speechless beggar. I expected to encounter some language barriers living so close to the border, but this woman was lily white. Except for the grunge.

  She followed me to the back of the store. When I entered the office, I asked her to wait in the small alcove.

  Turning my back to retrieve the water and my purse, I heard the tumultuous blast of sound along with the shattering of glass.

  Bag Lady reeled around and pulled something from her purse with her right hand. A blow to my shoulder with her left hand pushed me further into the office.

  The sound of bullets blasted out from the front of the store. Someone was shooting Bag Lady.

  Bag Lady fired a single shot and hollered at me to dial 911.

  Chapter 2

  A Shot not in the Dark.

  VICTOR ROMERO HEARD it on his home police scanner. Shots fired. Northwest side address.

  Nice part of town, he thought. Upscale shopping. Decadent restaurants with more decadent tabs.

  It hit him as hard as a kick to his nuts. “Sonuvabitch,” he yelled out to no one. Romero grabbed his keys and rolled down Catalina Highway in his treasured lime green P.T. Cruiser.

  BAG LADY PULLED off her crumpled coat and wrapped it around me. I had fallen against a wall and pulled my legs up to my body tighter and harder than a neutron star.

  “Stay put,” she said. “I gotta go check on him.”

  Now I was the one speechless and nodding. Something so stupid I’d learned when I was certified as a gemologist when they told me diamonds were not the hardest substance in our universe, I was thinking that a neutron star is ten billion times stronger than steel. In other words, I wasn’t really thinking about anything pertinent to what was happening out there.

  Time lost its fourth dimension. It was like the inviting white light of the tunnel and the flames of hell all emerged into one infinite space, and both were incomprehensible.

  “You okay, honey?” Bag Lady called out from our main salon.

  “Like a neutron star,” I said. I peered around the corner and into the alcove, then to the shattered glass sprayed across my new store. How okay could I be? A man is splayed out in pooling blood on the pearl travertine floor.

  The woman crouched over him and applied pressure to his chest wound.

  “He did it,” the injured man said.

  “Did what? Who did what?”

  And in a gasping voice the man said, “Trouble coming.”

  I could see him collapse into his own blood, which now ceased to pump. I could see his last laugh at life as he urinated, the colors of a golden yellow slowly seeping away from his pants and mingling with the red liquid of death.

  The woman now stood and began taking photographs, using a fancy camera with a huge zoom. Her subject? Blood and guts and a dead man missing some.

  My voice trembled, but I forced the words out hard and loud and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

  She smiled. A genuine smile of black teeth and green gum lines.

  Two policemen came from two directions, weapons drawn.

  “10-4,” Bag Lady said.

  One cop: “Well look at Ms. Shirley. Should have known you would be here. And aren’t you looking simply marvelous today?”

  Second cop: “I don’t know. I like her better as a two-dollar whore.”

  Bag Lady hugged Cop One and shook her head at Cop Two. “That would be a twenty-dollar whore,” she corrected him.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I pleaded.

  “We’ll take it from here,” Cop One said. “You have some answering—“

  Cop Two, “And in walks the devil, himself.”

  I recognized the man instantly. Victor Romero. I was living in Los Angeles when my Tucson friend was killed, but nobody believed it. They ruled it a suicide. Victor Romero, a retired cop working as a private detective, believed it. He believed me. He believed in the honor of my friend.

  He turned to embrace me. A gargantuan bone-breaking hug. “Good to see you, Sterling, but like they say, maybe not under these circumstances.”

  He looked back to the policemen with a let’s-all-stay-put clench of the hands, then again to me. “These cameras working?”

  Eight were newly installed on the high interior walls. Three, outside. “Two of them,” I said.

  Romero, back to the cops, “Evidence. Get it.” Back to me, “You can help them get the video, can’t you?”

  “Only after you tell me what’s going on,” I said.

  Cop Two rolled the dead man over. “Crap. It’s Manuel Perez. A.K.A. anyone you want him to be,” he said, pulling out the wallet from the bloodied pants that held about six fake ID’s and none that bore his real name.

  “Yeah,” Romero said, looking at me. “Good old Manny. He has a rap sheet that could line the walls of The Louvre.”

  “I don’t need to be introduced to a dead man, Victor. Who is she?” I pointed at Bag Lady.

  Bag Lady shrugged, but with an odd shrug and glimmer hidden somewhere in her eyes.

  “I’m retired, Ms. Falls. This time for good. Not here officially, but I listen to my scanner and I knew the address. I knew you were coming to town. This here is Ms. Shirley. She’s one hell of an undercover.

  “Come on, Shirley. Give her a little of the real you,” he said. “With a dead man’s guts on Ms. Fall’s new pretty floor, and you scaring the B-Jesus out of her, she might just pack up and move out of Dodge before she’s even unpacked.”

  Bag Lady stood erect. Tall. Almost as tall as me. She removed the outer clothes and the padding from underneath them. Slender. She tossed two plastic bags at Romero. He ducked. They fell to the bloody floor.

  “Messing up the crime scene, Shirley. Come on. Keep going,” Romero said.

  The wig came off next. Underneath that rat nest was a coifed French bun. Mostly silver hair. Maybe some blond. She retrieved a plastic box from her large bag, then popped out two mouthpieces. Her teeth now sparkled white and brilliant.

  “It’s why I don’t talk much when I’m wearing these things,” she said, as if annoyed. She dropped the fakes with the blackened teeth, missing teeth, and green gum lines into the box and snapped it shut. ‘Hell, I can’t even mumble with these damn things.”

  I turned back to Romero. Digesting. Thinking. My body was fully charged, but my brain lagged behind. “What is she doing here?”

  “I guess she was trying to drum up some business,” Romero said. “And it looks like she found some.”

  A wretched smell began to pierce through the already coppery stink of blood in the air.

  Bag Lady, now Shirley, looked at me with another one of her shrugs. “Sorry, honey. Vic was supposed to catch those little bags. He used to be a catcher, you know.”

  Romero laughed, looking at the two plastic bags that had started oozing out some liquid onto the floor, mixing in with the pools of blood and urine. It wasn’t exactly champagne laced with Chambord.

  “Modern day stink bombs,” Romero explained. “Squeeze them a little bit and you get your smell du jour. Whatever you want. So
me urine. Some feces. Sometimes even the smell of money. Guess they landed on the floor a little too hard.”

  “You’re a lousy catcher these days,” Bag Lady laughed at Romero. And to me, “The smell goes away in about five minutes. I promise.”

  The medical examiner arrived, did his thing, and removed what he could of the remains of the would-be thief. Another pair of cops boarded up the storefront’s windows and door. They shook hands with Romero and told him that their work was done. They mentioned a Detective Taylor would be arriving in a ‘few’ and Victor Romero let out a huge sigh and a big, “Yes!”

  I fell back into one of the new jeweler’s chairs, still covered with the protective plastic wrapping.

  “They’re done?” I gasped, looking at the blood and the guts and the oozing stinky bags.

  Romero and Shirley told me we needed to wait for this Detective Taylor. She pulled out a cell phone from the same old bag. “We know who to call, Sterling. You’re going to have to pay some big bucks, but she’ll be here within the hour and by morning you’ll never know or feel like anything happened here tonight.” She handed me a card as she used speed dialing to make the call.

  The card, plain as it was, said it all. Scene Clean. Crime Scene Specialists. Zoey Lane: Sole Proprietress.

  Chapter 3

  Now and Then

  Detective Stephen Michael Taylor arrived at the scene before I could puke in the bathroom. Tall guy. Friendly looking. Deep voice. In control. And when he pulled Romero into a playful full nelson I knew I was in good company.

  “Looks like retirement is getting to you, chubby,” Taylor joked. “Too much beer and too many cigars.”

  “The only bad habit I have is listening to the police scanner,” Romero said.

  My brain couldn’t process Taylor. He talked too fast. I could tell by his dialect he was from the east. He later explained he was from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A real transplant, I thought. He and Romero made me feel safe. Calm. I still couldn’t think clearly, but I also no longer needed to barf.